The further and continuing adventures of the girl who sat in the back of your homeroom, reading and daydreaming.

Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Technological Speculations

I. It suddenly occurs to me that hovercraft, GPS and the kind of mediated fly-by-wire systems that let military pilots fly nearly unflyable aircraft right to the edge of the envelope might be a perfect match. A problem with most hovercraft is they're borderline unstable in the horizontal plane and difficult to control, but these days we can fake stability. Bet the .mil has been doing it for years already.

II. Watching Onion News Empire last night (hilarious!), I was once again struck by what a kludge the user interface for video switchers is: a whacking huge panel, covered in buttons and sliders. These days it's just a control surface, the buttons are all freely assignable, but why are they physical buttons at all? A great big touchscreen would do as well, with one or two mouse-derived external controls. The operator would just drag icons (thumbnails?) onto a timeline -- or several timelines -- perhaps interspersed with icons for specialized transitions, and just have a big Next Event button and perhaps a set of fader bars as physical controls. Giant touchscreens are already out there; the IS department where I work has a couple of Windows 8 machines talking to 48" touchscreens. Physical switches wear out; a sheet of glass, not so much.

6 comments:

When I worked for a company that made mail sorting equipment, the controls for our machine were all buttons on a touch screen. They were modeled on the physical controls of older models of mail sorting machines. Push the big green button to start the belts up. Push another button to start the mail feeding through. Push the big red button on the screen to stop everything.

Of course, there were several physical big red buttons - E-Stop! - spread around the machine.

"I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions."